/ 25 May 2008

Burma monks, priests beat controls to give aid

While big international donors try to persuade Burma’s military rulers to open their doors wider to aid, small groups of volunteers are getting past army checkpoints to reach desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

Among them were Catholics and Buddhists seeking to fulfil a charitable mission under extreme circumstances three weeks after the devastating storm left 2,5-million people destitute, most of them in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy Delta.

On Sunday, larger than normal crowds of worshippers gathered at Burma’s biggest Catholic cathedral to hear priests criticise the slow pace of aid ”for our suffering countrymen”.

”We need the world to speak out because our people are dying every minute,” one priest, who asked not to be identified, said at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, built in 1899.

Small groups of parishioners had been able to get past military checkpoints in recent days and visited delta fishing villages where they found starving people, he said.

Elsewhere in Rangoon, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was attending a donor pledging conference days after he received a promise from junta leader Than Shwe to allow more Western aid workers into the delta.

Critics say the seven-day visas already granted to some foreign relief workers are too short and that some Burma nationals have also been barred from the delta.

”One of the most disturbing things that we heard was even Burmese were being intimidated and harassed and prevented from helping their own people,” activist Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative Asean Network on Burma, said in Bangkok.

”They are also blocking communications and transportation equipment,” she said.

Too little aid

However, a European aid official said the generals had begun to talk about funding and the need for foreign advisers.

”So there are the first signs of a wider opening,” said the official, who declined to be named.

Army checkpoints on the main road south to the delta stood empty on Saturday on the Maha Bandula bridge, named after the Burmese general who fought against British colonial rule.

Army trucks carrying sacks of rice were seen driving across the Rangoon River, but people in the town of Kyauktan, 30km from the former capital, said they had received little aid.

”We are homeless. Every time something goes wrong we get help only from the monks,” a woman said as she sat with hundreds of others on the wooden floor of a monastery.

Around 252 people, including scores of children, were crammed into the small building with 10 resident monks. Parts of the roof in three corners are missing.

Around them, the palm, coconut and betel nut trees look as if their trunks have been shorn by cannon fire. Houses and factories had their windows blasted out by the fierce winds.

Still, Kyauktan got off relatively lightly compared with the western delta, where aid workers have yet to reach many in need.

Some roads to the southwest are no longer guarded by soldiers, but instead by upturned tree roots and trunks. Villagers are slowly cutting them with handsaws.

The golden stupas of pagodas are mostly twisted or snapped, while a massive seated Buddha statue had been flayed by cyclone shrapnel, blasting off many of the small mirrors inlaid into its concrete robes.

”All the monasteries are damaged, but we are helping,” said Danta Pinya Wantha, the 81-year-old abbot of Kyauktan’s monastery. ”There are 23 other monasteries in the area and we are relying on local people to donate what they can.” – Reuters